Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Mantel was attacking the paper doll in which newspapers have imprisoned the real Kate Middleton. That can't be acknowledged without admitting the idea that there's a gap between this paper doll and the real person – that the Kate of your own front page is a brutal and sentimental fiction maintained for ease and profit. The point of Mantel's piece was necessarily invisible to parsing in a Daily Mail news story. So a story had to be made – because here was a famous writer writing about a subject of intense interest to the paper – by missing the point.